OT: PC World are useless - was Re: [Gllug] OT: microdirect.co.ukreliable?

[Tethys]

Bruce Richardson writes:

>Leaving aside the fact that many editors (e.g. Vim and Emacs) can edit
>compressed files in situ, what is to stop you compressing the file after
>you've written it?  

PDF is a structured file format. It's not like OO.o or gnumeric, where
the whole file is compressed with gzip (spit!). Rather, individual parts
of it are LZW compressed. In theory, you could have something that read
PDF in a plain text format (which doesn't exist -- it would have to be
specifically created for this task), and then compress the relevant parts
to create a normal PDF.

Alternatively, you could consider PostScript to be the plain text version
of PDF. It's easy to convert between them, but you do lose out on the
extra features provided by PDF if you do so. I suppose in theory you could
preserve those features in structured comments within the PostScript, but
AFAIK, no one has done so yet.

Tet
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